Explore our online annual report for interviews, key facts and figures on digital television switchover in the year to 31 March 2010

We need to provide real help to people and that’s about making the complicated simple and being completely independent and truthful in the information that we give; we’re not trying to sell anybody anything.

The benefits of local communication is that it’s much more effective and much more concentrated than a national campaign and it has allowed us to save substantial amounts of money. And the reason for this is because every bit of communication that we deliver is highly relevant, it’s not something that’s meant for the whole country, it’s meant for you.

I think in 2009 our communications have been very different because we’ve worked with rural areas, where we’ve had to use types of communications that normally, most marketers don’t use. For instance, lampposts, we’re using telephone boxes because there’s nothing else there, a lot of direct, town hall events. So the communications that we do in rural Wales for instance would be very different from that which we’d do in an area like Granada, where everything in Granada is about getting cut through. There’s so much media out there that you actually need to be bold and brave and wrap busses and have big electronic screens; anything to cut through the noise that’s out there. So the approaches that we have are very different.

We succeeded in driving awareness to virtually 100 per cent; conversion reached 98-99 per cent on the eve before switchover and people were comfortable with the process and comfortable with our communications.

We’ve made a number of key changes in 2009. I think one of the key ones has been around timing. It’s always been really important to tell people that a change is coming and create a sense of inevitability so we started our communications quite far in advance of switchover and that’s been important. But as we move on, there’s a real need to focus all our effort, our money and our time, in the last few months before switchover, because that’s when people act and that’s been probably the biggest change in our communications.

And I think the last thing is about when you’re reaching out to more vulnerable people, there’s a limit to what communications can do and you actually need to be working in partnerships with other people. So for instance we found that our road shows where we’ve provided face to face help on the ground, has been really important. But we’ve also needed to work alongside local charities and with our retail partners because they’re the people that often, somebody who has got questions, will turn to because they’re the people that they know. And so we found it so important to make sure that those people are properly trained and properly informed and working alongside us.